


The Return

by brook456



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Abuse of Emdashes, Agressive Descriptions, An Attempt to Write like Lovecraft, Canon Compliant, Eldritch Abominations, Gen, Lots of Run Ons, Musings about Entropy, Portal Ford Being a BAMF, Spoilers - Journal 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-22 00:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9574685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brook456/pseuds/brook456
Summary: Ford returns to the Nightmare Realm to confront Bill.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Quick thing I did for Forduary, Week 1: Portal. Kind of turned into weird descriptions and philosophical ramblings? Alas alas.

It is the smell that gets to you first, a smell so rancid and horrific that you almost don’t see at as a smell, rather feel it in your bones, this atmosphere so much like death itself that it raises the hairs on your neck long before you are even aware of what has hit you. And your revulsion, or more accurately, need to flee before it—for instinctive is your fear, an animal scrabbling in the depths of your subconscious, a warning learned from generations of death and birth—is justified. The scent itself carries no threat, but any creature in any realm that did not run at the faintest whiff of true nothingness, the stink of the void between dimensions and the froth beyond time and space—did not survive. No creature, save for those who made it their home.

Home. Perhaps it is unfair to call it home, even for such things as inscrutable and terrible as the creatures in that place—or rather, absence of place—itself. Beings who twist in infinitudes of dimension, who occupy spaces unseen and whose sides merge into each other and become impossibilities, and perhaps you have an impression of an arm or a tongue or some familiar part glimmering in the mess—he swore that everything there had eyes the color of amber, that familiar fearful glow of death—but perhaps these familiar shapes are merely the fabrication of a mind which was never built to understand what is really there. Still, even such terrible creatures do not belong in this absence that reeks of fear—there can be, by definition, nothing outside of reality. The realm of nightmares is not tenable to any being that truly exists, no matter how ageless or impossible. Their time here, outside of time—is limited. They must seek a world of true matter, or eventually dissolve truly into nothing. They have no home. In this sense, they are like him.

Because he too has fallen to nothing. The world of his birth may not have been consigned to flame like those of the others, still exists somewhere in all solidity and realness that could ever be hoped, but it is no longer his home. It is like any other of the millions of universes that spin beyond this terrible void, so coveted by the denizens that have been driven into it—but otherwise unremarkable. He could’ve been from any world. He, or someone like him, _has_ been from many worlds. To say that this one means anything to him merely because it was his place of origin is folly—there is nothing there for him, or so he thinks, no one there waiting, no one who hasn’t left long ago. Perhaps this is for the better. Only a man with nothing left to lose can dare the emptiness between the stars, the absence of place that reeks like burning hair, and take on the demons that wish to leave it. Because he intends to take them down with him and banish their hopes of ever being real. He intends to make them nothing, just as they made him.

It’s a fight, however, as it must be. A fight between existence and destruction, the fight that rages within all creatures that live, even monstrosities unfathomable. But matter, energy, no matter how exotic—they can not flee from entropy. His weapon shreds through existence and pulls it apart, tears proton from neutron, space from time, energy from matter. Impossible, perhaps, to truly destroy something. But no more impossible than a machine that creates work from nothing, that spins and spins forever in the darkness—and he made that so, long ago. But now, where he has once created, he destroys.

Existence, however, despite the inevitability of destruction, is not unarmed. To see this one must merely look around and see that there is something—something which has triumphed over nothing for billions of years. And things that exist, things that live, have the intent to remain as they are—the demons outside of reality wish to enter it, and even He who crowns Himself ruler of the void between worlds, the froth between dimensions, knows it. Chaos requires order to disrupt, and when this man comes burning through emptiness with death in his hands he must be met with resistance. Resistance and suffering and punishment.

And how, after all, can he win? After all he is so small. He is outnumbered, overpowered, and has no drive to survive—after all he has no home, nor desire of one. The question is not whether he will live—it is whether he will live long enough to take the One with him into the emptiness, whose borders they already dance so precariously above. It is a question that seems to be answered when he is deceived yet again, caught in illusions and twisting pathways and impossible shapes. He will lose before he wins. But perhaps it is too soon to say. He remembers suddenly that here there is only nothing here, in this realm of darkness, and he leaps through illusion to the truth. He leaps, and suddenly the answer seems as definite as it has been before, but this time will win before he loses.

Again, you would be wrong.

He is not, perhaps, as homeless as he believes. He sees it as a cruel twist of fate, as does the demon, who’s laughter echoes in his head until he fears his brain may bleed from his ears. It will take time, time for him to see it as it really is—inevitable. There are so many worlds out there, each with their own portals tearing through the night at different times—there must be one who's time is now. That it would be his is luck, but it must be someone’s. _His_. His portal, his home. He still believes it is not, but it must still not fall prey to the creatures that lurk outside it. And so he is plucked from the emptiness into the light. And so he is returned.


End file.
